Wednesday, January 17, 2007
« Any proposition containing the word 'is'... | Main | With apologies to Mr Jean Paul de Sousa ... »
If there is a vanity mirror behind the driver's side visor, it's a chick car

I'm just getting into the second week of some annual leave.  Note to my employer:  Don't let me remember just how... how... relaxing, yes!  that's it, relaxing annual leave can be, I digress...

Today's story is that for the sake of nothing more than the coffee was good and that else I would spend the day on the couch, I went to wire up a network in a friends store today.  It was also for the sake of making sure I could still handle on some of the basics like crimp RJ45 ends on CAT-5CAT-6 and so on.

I don't think my friend is able to get just what I get from it.   It's something like brewing your own beer and juicing your own oranges, something organic.  For four hours I got to get dusty in the problems of his business.  Very interesting.  He uses a paper diary even!

Consider this little thought experiment:  So your business involves printing peoples photos.  Way back in the day, the average guy shot 24 or 36 frames on some Kodak Gold and got the role printed at the minilab, because otherwise it was just a tin - it wasn't "photos" until you printed them.

Then the digital world hits and 10x the people own cameras, PDAs and phones.  Now each frame is a photo in its own right as soon as you take it!  You could print it on your inkjet, email it, post it to Flickr, show it on your ipod, show it on your media centre, show it on your mobile, et cetera...

Now so many more people are taking digital pictures, but instead of everyone printing every frame, about 15% of people taking digital images are making any prints at all.  Smaller slice of a bigger pie.  This wasn't lost on Agfa, Fuji are watching and it isn't lost on Kodak and Konica Minolta.  Time to give the business model a rethink... but how?!?  As a small business you may not get too many bites at it! 

(Love to hear any of your ideas - post a comment!)

Tangentally, this reminds me of a tech firm I once had chance to experience.  Management thought the one performance review form could be used for both a Sales Exec/BDM role and a junior network admin role.  Turns out that "Networking" means different things to these two roles.  Whoda thunk it?  *rolls eyes*

Sorry for the cryptic title, it's to subtly encourage your thoughts down an empirical path...

Listening To: spose iz Lily innit, a'rite?

Geeking Out!
Tuesday, January 16, 2007 11:01:59 PM (AUS Eastern Standard Time, UTC+10:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [1]  |  Related posts:
Visual Studio 2008 Professional vs. Standard edition. Just what are the differences? Is it Features?
The var keyword (C# 3.0) - Nothing at all like VB6 Variant - It's not even a Type!
Bringing Grep back using PowerShell
iTunes messages not getting any better despite constant updates!
First DR scare at the new office
Sign your way to better quality with a x509 Certificate
Wednesday, January 24, 2007 10:17:46 AM (AUS Eastern Standard Time, UTC+10:00)
I imagine people are spending less on traditional products and services at camera stores. Don't know for sure but commonsense would suggest so. We do know that most people don't buy film or have film processed any more. We also see $300 cameras sold at Aldi, so the snappy camera has turned more into electronic device than photographic gear and the retail outlets for `run-of-the-mill` photographic equipment has expanded it's front, including the rise and rise of eBay and international sales delivered to your door.

The current digital age lets anyone with a budget computer, dirt-cheap ink and glossy paper reproduce photo quality, so now, processing is done at home, or cheaply at megastores like Harvey Norman's. While the staff behind the counter probably can't tell you that you shouldn't have been facing a sunny window for those under-exposed shots, people are empowered to review their photos instantly and are able to correct any problems, or simply take enough photos that they can afford to delete that bright one.

However, I have noticed that people that are challenged by "the digital age" were far more comfortable with the whole film processing thang than that of digital film processing (which relies on them using a computer somewhere), so now, those precious snapshots are left on the memory card, not backed up, not filed, not printed.

I guess that ye olde processing stores could really pick up some of that lost business by inserting a human touch to this final phase, by offering digital film classes, making people feel comfortable about digital photography, and at the POS perhaps upselling things like webspace, backups to CD, authored DVDs, photos-to-email.


--
Julian

p.s. let me know how your cabling goes ;)

Jules
Comments are closed.